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Ottawa and the MPs — recording artists of the future: Delacourt

By susan delacourtparliamentary bureau

Fri., Nov. 28, 2014

OTTAWA—A member of Parliament advises his colleagues, in the interests of their reputations, to always wear concealed recording equipment.

What could possibly go wrong?

We may never know what the Prime Minister’s Office said to Conservative MP Peter Goldring about the wacky advice he issued, then retracted on Wednesday.

But we do know that the near and distant past is littered with persuasive arguments against putting recording devices into the hands of political types — including some bitter experience involving Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his own Conservative party.

It’s as if no one remembers the paranoid president Richard Nixon, Watergate, and the perils of secretly taping your adversaries. (For those whose brains have accidentally erased the 1970s, try a Google search with the words “Nixon,” “tapes,” “gap” and “Rose Mary Woods.”)

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Just this week, Conservatives were struggling to dig themselves out of an embarrassing debacle in the Alberta riding of Banff-Airdrie, involving a young volunteer, a Liberal candidate and a tape recorder.

Conservatives alleged that their recorder-toting volunteer caught the Liberal candidate, Mario Raynolds, saying stupid things about income-splitting, and promptly handed over the recording to a favoured news network.

Small problem: Raynolds said the remarks were made by someone else in the recorded conversation — a man named Tam McTavish, who readily admitted that it was his voice, not Raynolds, on the Conservatives’ recording.

The news network then retracted the story, but the Conservative party stuck to its claims, hiring an audio expert to assert that the remarks were indeed made by Raynolds.

My favourite case was way back in 1999, when the Star’s own Les Whittington released his book, The Banks. In one part of the book, then-minister of finance Paul Martin was quoted as saying that the bankers were all “liars.”

Martin’s office, seeing those words in black and white, asserted that Martin called them “rivals” and released enhanced audio by the experts to bolster their claim. It still sounded like “liars” to most listeners.

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Harper, we might remember, generated some brisk business for audio experts in the year before he knocked Martin’s Liberal government out of power in 2006. Two of the tape-recording fiascos, in fact, revolved around what kind of deals were being made in the backrooms to either keep Martin in office or topple him.

In what was bombshell news in the spring of 2005, one of Harper’s own MPs, Gurmant Grewal, revealed that he had secretly recorded conversations he had with high-level people in Martin’s government about crossing the floor to the Liberals.

But as the odd story unfolded, and the experts did their audio analysis, bizarre gaps emerged in Grewal’s recordings — reminiscent of the mysterious, missing 18-plus minutes in the Nixon Watergate tapes. Eventually the audio experts determined that the Grewal recordings had been spliced and diced to suit the MP’s story — that he was, no kidding, acting as a secret agent to expose shadowy Liberal deal-making.

A recent postscript: Grewal didn’t run again in 2006 and his bid for a political comeback was quashed earlier this month when the Conservative party refused to approve his candidacy. No reason was offered for the refusal.

The other recording dispute of that time involved Harper himself on tape, in the so-called “Cadman affair.”

A B.C. author named Tom Zytaruk, while he was writing a book in 2005 about the late MP Chuck Cadman, taped a conversation with Harper. The conversation revolved around what Conservatives had allegedly offered Cadman in the spring of 2005 to secure his support in a crucial vote in the Commons. (Cadman was an independent; he died not long after casting that crucial vote, in favour of keeping Liberals in power.)

Zytaruk’s tape appeared to indicate that Harper knew of some financial inducement (which is illegal) being offered by Conservative operatives. But Harper countered that the tape was doctored and launched a libel suit against Liberals in 2008 for making the allegation.

During the libel proceedings, an audio expert determined that no tape-doctoring had taken place. The whole question of what happened with Cadman fizzled into insignificance when Conservatives dropped the libel case in 2009.

With all these experiences burned into the long-term memory around Parliament Hill, it’s no surprise, then, that Goldring’s bizarre advice to MPs sent up immediate alarm bells.

When politicians start taking up recording devices against each other, things seem to go terribly, inevitably wrong. Besides, the cynics might ask: What’s the use of trying to capture a politician secretly on tape? When the tapes eventually do emerge, they all sound like rivals.

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